Oct. 16, 2006 issue - When Iraq's current government was formed last April, after four months of bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis, many voices in America and in Iraq said the next six months would be the crucial testing period. That was a fair expectation. It has now been almost six months, and what we have seen are bitter disputes, wrangling and paralysis. Meanwhile, the violence has gotten worse, sectarian tensions have risen steeply and ethnic cleansing is now in full swing. There is really no functioning government south of Kurdistan, only power vacuums that have been filled by factions, militias and strongmen. It is time to call an end to the tests, the six-month trials, the waiting and watching, and to recognize that the Iraqi government has failed. It is also time to face the terrible reality that America's mission in Iraq has substantially failed.

More waiting is unlikely to turn things around, nor will more troops. I understand the impulse of those who want to send in more forces to secure the country. I urged just such a policy from the first week of the occupation. But today we are where we are. Over the past three years the violence has spread and is now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political masters in Baghdad. In this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American policies help. The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more-sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors. But what might well have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006.

Iraq is now in a civil war. Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three years, more than in many other conflicts widely recognized as civil wars. The number of internal refugees, mostly Sunni victims of ethnic cleansing, has exploded over the past few months, and now exceeds a quarter of a million people. (The Iraqi government says 240,000, but this doesn't include Iraqis who have fled abroad or who may not have registered their move with the government.) The number of attacks on Shiite mosques increases every week: there have been 69 such attacks since February, compared with 80 in the previous two and a half years. And the war is being fought on gruesome new fronts. CBS News's Lara Logan has filed astonishing reports on the Health Ministry, which is run by supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. According to Logan, hospitals in Baghdad and Karbala are systematically killing Sunni patients and then dumping their bodies in mass graves.

6. Shit, remember 2003? Even Josh Marshall had joined the rah-rah for war

How could so many good people be so blind? Maybe the DC Beltway is like the town limits of old Dodge City Kansas. Wyatt Earp used to make visitors turn in their guns whenever they entered town. Only with DC, they turn in their wits.

Iraq? On This Week with Stephanopoulos, or on his own new foreign affairs show on ABC?

"State of Denial" has a passage about a very influential secret meeting in Novermber 2001 where "scholars" from the Ameircan Enterprise Institute almost unanimously advocated invading Iraq to fight international terrorism. I was surprised to see Fareed Zakaria's name in the list of attendees. What is his background?

Very establishment. He's a mainstream think-tanker, Harvard, New Republic, "Foreign Affairs" magazine, Trilateral Commission. He was born in Mumbai of Muslim parents and is connected out the ass to all the "right people"--he's of the class of intellectuals who can always be assured of a job no matter how often they're wrong or how bad their advice fucks up the country.

Zakaria is on the right side of things more often than he's on the Right's side. He's just superestablishment and therefor safe from the consequences of major screw ups he makes. But he's definitely from the Indian upper class interest (I nearly typed "British"!) that runs his country with a sometimes callous, if well intentioned hand. Much of his family has immigrated here and the principle of lateral entry seems to apply with how he's neatly plugged into our world of upper class liberal intellectuals.

"The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more-sensible policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors."

Rumsfailed is an asshole and a War Criminal but sometimes he is correct. He said this type of situation sometimes takes 12 years to reach the desired outcome. What is that? An Iraqi Republic that is peaceful, Capitalistic with a semblance of democracy that will do favorable business with the US/UK. The problem is that most Iraqis and Americans aren't willing to invest the blood and money for 12 years to see if the desired outcome will be achieved.

Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three yearsMore like the last six months.

Last night I heard one of the CNN hacks saying that Iraqi and US military had killed several insurgents but no Iraqis had died. I had to wonder how fighting against occupation suddenly means you are no longer a citizen of your own country.

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